The business of the “Great House” is divided into two branches; the issue and the banking department. The latter has increased so rapidly of late years, that the last addition the Old Lady was constrained to make to her house was the immense Drawing-room aforesaid, for her customers and their payees to draw cash on checks and to make deposits. Under this noble apartment is the Strong Room, containing private property, supposed to be of enormous value. It is placed there for safety by the constituents of the Bank, and is concealed in tin boxes, on which the owners’ names are legibly painted. The descent into this stronghold—by means of the hydraulic trap we have spoken of—is so eminently theatrical, that we believe the Head of the Department, on going down with the books, is invariably required to strike an attitude, and to laugh in three sepulchral syllables; while the various clerks above express surprise and consternation. Besides private customers, everybody knows that our Old Lady does all the banking business for the British Government. She pays the interest to each Stock-holder in the National Debt, receives certain portions of the revenue, &c. A separate set of offices is necessary, to keep all such accounts, and these Stock Offices contain the most varied and extensive collection of autographs extant. Those whom Fortune entitles to dividends, must, by themselves or by their agents, sign the Stock books. The last signature of Handel, the composer, and that upon which Henry Fauntleroy was condemned and executed, are among the foremost of these lions. Here, standing in a great long building of divers stories, looking dimly upward through iron gratings, and dimly downward through iron gratings, and into musty chambers diverging into the walls on either hand, you may muse upon the National Debt. All the sheep that ever came out of Northamptonshire, seem to have yielded up their skins to furnish the registers in which its accounts are kept. Sweating and wasting in this vast silent library, like manuscripts in a mouldy old convent, are the records of the Dividends that are, and have been, and of the Dividends unclaimed. Some men would sell their fathers into slavery, to have the rummaging of these old volumes. Some, who would let the Tree of Knowledge wither while they lay contemptuously at its feet, would bestir themselves to pluck at these leaves, like shipwrecked mariners. These are the books to profit by. This is the place for X. Y. Z. to hear of something to his advantage in. This is the land of Mr. Joseph Ady’s dreams. This is the dusty fountain whence those wondrous paragraphs occasionally flow into the papers, disclosing how a labouring thatcher has come into a hundred thousand pounds—a long, long way to come—and gone out of his wits—not half so far to go. Oh, wonderful Old Lady! threading the needle with the golden eye all through the labyrinth of the National Debt, and hiding it in such dry hay-stacks as are rotting here!